So we finally meet! You can't imagine how hard I've tried to get my hands on a machine that could run AmigaOS 4 in all its glory. I've never used the Amiga before - not during its heydays, and not during its afterglow - so it meant an unexplored world for me. You can imagine my excitement when ACube Systems, makers of the sam440ep board that runs AmigaOS 4.1, offered a review machine to me, built around their own PowerPC sam440ep flex motherboard.

Well,is hard for me to be objective when a fellow OS is involved; Thom as an outsider of the Amiga world expressed its concerns about AOS 4.1; so far, i got to realise that the Amiga OSes, including my endorsed AROS are made "by amigans for amigans" in paraphrase to the usual saying for linux.
What I mean is that, when i got interested in AROS in 2006 and tried the live CD, the first thing that made me fell in love with it was the feeling similar to the one of using an Amiga OS, in good and in bad: there were undoubtely flaws, but were *our* flaws, stuff we Amiga users had to live with everyday.

Like the workbench: as file manager has always been not the best option: Directory opus or filemaster has been Amiga user best friends since 1989 to help overcome those flaws,and still Amiga and AROS users deal with it either with the commercial old Magellan or the open source dopus 4 revisited, in example.

And now some of the Amiga desktop paradigmas and usability might look outdated to people coming from other systems, while people like me , used that all the time, actually feel comfortable with the windows that does not stack on click, allowing to focus on the main task and handling stuff in the back; but again is all matter of perception and habits.

I am glad that after many years of inertia things started to move in the amiga world again, but the problem is there is a lot to catch up and so far good old Amiga OSes are now a niche market for aficionados and a hobby; and looks like it might stay like this for long time, and not aspire to be more until many of the flaws are catched up, though i have good feelings about the netbook market...

At the end my personal opinion is: if you never used an Amiga OS or like and want to have a taste of it but have no money to spend, the first answer is try AROS, considered it is free and runs in most x86 hardware (and in virtual machines too); then, once you got used to it, if you like it, you can go the next level and buy a SAM for AOS or EFIKA for MOS too, according to tastes.

I have to agree. Me and my Amiga friends never used the workbench for serious file management.

That is what the über-powerful Directory Opus is for.

I really miss the different screen feature on Linux .. too bad current graphics card don't really support it.

I also agree that Aros is a good way to bring people to AmigaOS. Being FOSS will help work around the memory protection issues. The good thing about unproteted memory is that bugs show up REALLY FAST. So if you use well tested apps they will JUST WORK.

Awww, if only Commodore had made all the right choices with this gem instead of making all the wrong ones